I am having to play a serious game of catch up with my blog posting. We return to the adventures with a 3½ year old to report on a trip to a donkey sanctuary, which was full of, needless to say, donkeys. I was clearly expected to know the names of every donkey present. This was followed by negotiating a ridiculous diversion in order to purchase many varieties of garlic at a garlic farm. You’d be amazed at what can be combined with garlic, with varying degrees of success: ice cream, chocolate and beer to name but three.

Day 6 found us minus the 3½ year old, who had departed for home. We fought the remnants of tropical storm Brian in the most exposed spot on the island. This sadly saw the demise of my Niagara Falls red plastic poncho, as it was whipped to shreds by the gale. I suppose I had done well to preserve it for two years.

I finally reacquainted myself with my house for a couple of days. During which time I viewed some very interesting local history documents, chatted to my Writing and Telling your Family History students for the first time and gave a talk to a group of local metal detectorists (as opposed to a group of metal detectors – which is what I wrote originally – that would just be weird). We were billed to give our normal seventeenth century social history talk but decided to change the focus to concentrate on metal objects. This turned out to have more scope than you would think. We spoke of armour, of weaponry, of instruments surgical and of torture (fine line between the two anyway). We had cutlery, cooking pots, plates and mugs to allow us the opportunity to talk of the food of the time. All in all an interesting slant on what we do.

There was also the incident with the village guy (as in Fawkes) competition but I think I will save that until I have recovered from visiting a not yet 2 and a very nearly 4 year old and it is the appropriate day.